The Emilie Loring Collection

I love finding true-life connections, as I did last summer with Gay Courage. Nancy Caswell lives with her father in the parsonage at Sunnyfield:

“There were little rabbits with upstanding ears cut in the yellow shutters. Gay orange and white awnings shaded the porches, boxes spilling over with yellow and white and purple blooms, adorned windows without, snowy muslins were visible within.”

I looked through the photo albums of the fellow who owned Emilie’s secondary cottage in Blue Hill for some decades, and there they were: cute little bunnies cut into the shutters–white by then, but surely, originally yellow.

Emilie’s Dutch Colonial was called “The Ledges” locally, because it sat on a stone ledge, over thirty feet above the East Blue Hill Road. A 1928 home movie shows Emilie and her husband descending its steep, stone steps just as you might imagine they would–Emilie’s step dainty, Victor’s firm.

The cottage was intended for writing and guest quarters and had nearly the same floor plan as Stone House, with built-in bookshelves for summer reading. The interior was bare wood, and above the fireplace was a stone facade depicting a sailboat with full rudder and keel.

Inside The Ledges

Stone sailboat

That was a particularly fun discovery. Emilie’s architects, Kilham, Hopkins & Greeley, used the same, stone sailboat idea in their 1941 design for the Community Sailing Boat House in Boston.  (I love the whole idea of Community Sailing, so I’m very happy about this.)

The Loring family remembers The Ledges as “Calendula Cottage,” which both fits and doesn’t.  The cottage and Emilie’s first, full-fledged gardening novel, Gay Courage, were finished in the same year, 1928.

Marigolds, a gold mine of them.  An occasional tall spike of larkspur lingering long beyond its time as though loath to give way to its rival, purple monkshood, giant masses of it.  There were patches of deepest orange. Tall pink lilies. Drifts of white cosmos, nuances of pale rose against dark greens. Gladioli in gorgeous profusion. Cloud mists of gypsophila. Brilliant color massed in the middle of the border shaded down to cool tints at the ends.

Orange King Calendula

Lemon Queen Calendula

Where Beauty Dwells, a later Blue Hill novel, even specifies “Orange King” and “Lemon Queen” calendulas (along with purple petunias) in its yellow, orange, and purple color scheme. Maybe that is when “Calendula Cottage” took hold as a nickname.

But the summer cottage has become a year-round home, and the forest has reclaimed the “Sunnyfield” in which it was built. Blueberries carpet the undergrowth and surround now-naturalized daffodils, narcissus, and perennials. You’re not likely to even see the private home through the trees as you drive along the East Blue Hill Road. But when you pick up Gay Courage, it’s all right there:

“Are you the miracle worker? I remember the Manse as a drab structure, in color a depressing blend of granite and clay.  It had a rubber-plant perennially at the window, gobs of scarlet geraniums on a scraggly lawn.”

Nancy Caswell’s laugh was delicious; “Scorn not the flower-grower’s best friend.  Blooms may come and blooms may go but the geranium keeps on…”

Let’s get to the story…